Can Peplink Balance 50 handel this?

[maxsteel]

I'm planning to use 5 wan cables from ADSL modems into Peplink Balance 50. Is it possible to run to have OpenVPN works fine which is gonna be activated from Asus Router and taking advantage from the faster bandwidth speed?

 

[stevech]

ask peplink.. unlikely anyone here knows.

I'll guess no.. due to DSL;'s need for PPPoE

 

[martinlangmaid]

HI, Martin from Peplink here. Since the Balance 50 only supports link load balancing across the available WAN links, the OpenVPN session can only use one WAN link at a time, so you can never have more than one WAN links bandwidth available for it. You get awesome failover functionality though.

We have our own VPN bonding technology called SpeedFusion which works between two of our SpeedFusion Enabled devices that can aggregate bandwidth from all available WANs. You can read about that here http://www.peplink.com/technology/speedfusion-bonding-technology/

 

[azazel1024]

HI, Martin from Peplink here. Since the Balance 50 only supports link load balancing across the available WAN links, the OpenVPN session can only use one WAN link at a time, so you can never have more than one WAN links bandwidth available for it. You get awesome failover functionality though.

We have our own VPN bonding technology called SpeedFusion which works between two of our SpeedFusion Enabled devices that can aggregate bandwidth from all available WANs. You can read about that here http://www.peplink.com/technology/speedfusion-bonding-technology/

That is actually pretty awesome on the VPN bonding over WAN.

 

[System Error Message]

Just took a look at peplink products and couldnt find more hardware information like CPU and RAM. Their cache devices look interesting but i would only get one if i could attach multiple hardrives in RAID. A single hard drive is capable of more than 100MB/s of throughput. I would prefer ram caching which is why i have a lot of ram and use ramdisks.

I wonder what the prices peplinks are like and it would be interesting to compare BPL-2500 to mikrotik CCR1036.

Ive seen many mikrotik customers that do VPN bonding but they usually do it within their core networks using CCRs to get many Gb/s of tunnel/VPN bandwidth.

their products do seem interesting.

 

[martinlangmaid]

That is actually pretty awesome on the VPN bonding over WAN.

Thanks, we like to think that SpeedFusion its pretty awesome too ;-)

We recently released a virtual SpeedFusion Bonding appliance, which can run in public hosted environments (there is an AWS version for example), and the whole idea there is you can use one of our physical routers that is SpeedFusion enabled, plug up to 13 WAN links in of any kind (fixed lines, cellular - whatever), and have a bonded VPN link between it and the publicly hosted appliance where you break out to the internet.

The end result is a resilient VPN connection - that can use WAN links from any ISP (and can even be fully mobile if you're just using cellular connections), that aggregates the available bandwidth and provides packet level failover when a WAN link is lost.

The plan is for our partners offer the hosted virtual appliance part as a service (although you can buy a license for your own use too of course), for those of us who live in rural locations with only slow speed DSL, maybe a little cellular and perhaps some local wifi services so that we can bond all of those together for faster more reliable internet connectivity.

 

[martinlangmaid]

Just took a look at peplink products and couldnt find more hardware information like CPU and RAM. Their cache devices look interesting but i would only get one if i could attach multiple hardrives in RAID. A single hard drive is capable of more than 100MB/s of throughput. I would prefer ram caching which is why i have a lot of ram and use ramdisks.

I wonder what the prices peplinks are like and it would be interesting to compare BPL-2500 to mikrotik CCR1036.

Ive seen many mikrotik customers that do VPN bonding but they usually do it within their core networks using CCRs to get many Gb/s of tunnel/VPN bandwidth.

their products do seem interesting.

All of our hardware is geared up specifically to support our SpeedFusion Bonding technology, so normally the important metrics are the number of SF Tunnels supported and the over all router throughput (rather than cpu/ram).

The mikrotik CCR1036 is an awesome bit of kit, and in a direct hardware comparison between it and the B2500, the CCR1036 comes out on top from a router throughput perspective. They are designed for very different things though in my opnion.

The B2500 is not meant to be a core routing device, instead its a specialist VPN concentrator that normally sits on the perimeter, and importantly it integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Peplink ecosystem.

By that I mean that it naturally supports VPN bonding connections with our other hardware platforms and also that you can manage it with InControl 2, our Cloud management platform, that it fully supports our proprietary VPN bonding technology, and it also comes with our 'award winning' easy to use web ui for configuration.

I wrote an article introducing Peplinks technology and products recently I'll link it here in case its of interest.

 

[System Error Message]

Thanks, we like to think that SpeedFusion its pretty awesome too ;-)

We recently released a virtual SpeedFusion Bonding appliance, which can run in public hosted environments (there is an AWS version for example), and the whole idea there is you can use one of our physical routers that is SpeedFusion enabled, plug up to 13 WAN links in of any kind (fixed lines, cellular - whatever), and have a bonded VPN link between it and the publicly hosted appliance where you break out to the internet.

The end result is a resilient VPN connection - that can use WAN links from any ISP (and can even be fully mobile if you're just using cellular connections), that aggregates the available bandwidth and provides packet level failover when a WAN link is lost.

The plan is for our partners offer the hosted virtual appliance part as a service (although you can buy a license for your own use too of course), for those of us who live in rural locations with only slow speed DSL, maybe a little cellular and perhaps some local wifi services so that we can bond all of those together for faster more reliable internet connectivity.

Interesting concept.

Im not sure how you design your hardware but usually combining wire, wireless and cellular usually does use the router CPU for doing the bridging and bonding since they come from different sources.

I just dont get how you differentiate performance between your models whether you do it by license or CPU capability or approximate. Your speedFusion may be proprietary but it still does have to utilise chips or CPU to do the work.

Does peplink support openVPN?

 

[Samir]

I've looked into the peplink products for increasing bandwidth for a site-to-site connection that's not fast enough. But the cost of the routers have me looking for alternate solutions. I can fly to the site every quarter for the cost of the routers.

 

[System Error Message]

I've looked into the peplink products for increasing bandwidth for a site-to-site connection that's not fast enough. But the cost of the routers have me looking for alternate solutions. I can fly to the site every quarter for the cost of the routers.

You're quite right. mikrotik CCRs are much cheaper than them and can bond VPN and tunnels and are much faster.

 

[Samir]

You're quite right. mikrotik CCRs are much cheaper than them and can bond VPN and tunnels and are much faster.

Actually, anyone in this space is around the same price--Mikrotik, Mushroom, etc. It's $1000+ to start.

 

[System Error Message]

quite wrong really, the mikrotik RB1100AHx2 is $300 while the CCR1009 is $400 and the CCR1009 can do VPN,IPSEC at more than 1 Gb/s and can do NAT at multi gigabit speeds if you dont use switched ports. Check the reference prices on their pages. The CCR1036 is $1000 but it would be much much cheaper than the BPL-2500 while being much faster at routing(faster than wirespeed) and many gigabits of VPN/tunnels and using less watts.

The only downside to mikrotik is that it is not easy to set it up for advanced high performance stuff. Go to their product pages and compare them. The CCR1036 can be compared to the BPL-2500 considering their range performance stats.

I compared the products between mikrotik and peplink within the same performance range and i found the only beneficial product peplink has is cache while mikrotik beats them hands down in price, performance and features. I used the reference prices from their website.

a quick search reveals the BPL-2500 to be $16K while a CCR1036 costs $1000. Compare the price, performance and features and you will see that the CCR1036 comes out on top being much cheaper, faster, more features and no license restrictions (level 6 routerOS has no restrictions). In routerOS you can actually bond multiple links such as cellular, wifi and wire altogether and even VPN over multiple links. speedfusion is just a way to make the bonding easier for the less skilled and with some optimisations. The CCR1036 has usb port

 

[System Error Message]

Sorry for the double post and biased opinions but i compared peplink balance to mikrotik and need to show some facts and that peplinks can be massively overpriced. I found that peplinks are many times more expansive than an equivalent mikrotik routerboard while mikrotik routerboards actually cover all the features that peplinks have. The only benefit of peplinks seem to have is the interface being more user friendly and cloud device management and better support. Both have license but a mikrotik license only affects the number of users (L6 being unlimited) not tunnels (as long as there is sufficient ram) while peplinks are limited by the model in number of tunnels and a bunch of other things. Other than that both can do exactly the same thing with routerOS having more features even VPN bonding and 3G/4G bonding with other internet sources (many routerboards do have usb).

For example the CCR1036 only costs up to $1,200 while the BPL-2500 from peplink costs $15,000. Both of them seem a direct competitor of each other. The CCR uses 60W max while the BPL-2500 uses 230W. The CCR1036 is still much faster for routing, NAT, firewall and even VPN and tunnels. I'll list the models with their equivalence and notable differences. I used amazon and peplink's website to compare the prices.

BPL 20/30/50 | almost any RB
$299,$399, $599 | <$200

BPL-ONE | Scorpion MIPS based RB/RB1100AHx2
$499 | <$150, $299

BPL 210/310-580 | RB850Gx2, RB1100AHx2
$1,201.11 - $3,324.00 | $150, $299
15W - 50W | 15W-30W

BPL 710 | RB1100AHx2, CCR1009
$4,695.00 | $299 - $500
70W | 30-40W

bpl 1350 | RB1100AHx2, CCR1009, CCR1016
$7,599.00 | $299 -$700
70W | 30-50W

BPL 2500 | ccr1016, CCR1036
$15000 | $700-$1200
230W | 50-60W

So comparing the stats and the obviously large price differences what exactly is the reason to go with peplink other than support and ease of use? Is it really worth such a huge price difference for that? Is it really worth 10x more in the mid to higher end? Mikrotik can bond multiple different links together both on the CPU or switch with CPU having a lot of different algorithms too, support for as many WANs as you like obviously with configurable firewall and a lot of other routing techniques supported with more features. I just had to point this out because the prices are very very expansive. A lot of the equivalent routerboards are equal or greater in speed while retaining the same features/OS with the limits only being hardware and license for wireless clients and hotspot users.

 

[azazel1024]

Are you positive that the Mikrotik routers can actually do site-to-site VPN WAN bonding (or for that matter VPN gigabit+ performance, because it does not look like they are able to, gigabit+ WAN with no encryption, sure, VPN overhead lumped in...)? That is a rather uncommon feature (though not unheard of). IIRC from looking them (Mikrotik), they do NOT support this feature on any of their products. All they have are a host of very configurable WAN loadbalancing and failover features.

I looked pretty extensively through feature sets, Mikrotik presentations and white papers.

 

[System Error Message]

you are quite right that mikrotik doesnt bond anything in the PPP catogary (i just checked on the CCR) but it can load balance them. Ive done it before over multiple PPPOE links and data went through both links (they had the same IP addresses) like as if they were bonded. It did require defining the same routes with the same distance and generally defined NAT.

Not sure if i have mentioned it but each core of the CCR does 350Mb/s of encrypted VPN and it has no trouble load balancing them. Each core may do more but i ran the bandwidth tester server on the CCR itself and got 350Mb/s with standard sized TCP packets per connection.

It seems that mikrotik can bond anything in the interface catogary but not PPP. Still i could ask for it in the feature requests and explain how it is different from tunnels. But even for a single VPN link it is cheaper and faster than the BPL 380

 

[Samir]

Very interesting. I looked at the Mikrotik products but didn't see a model that could utilize both vpn links for an application like rdp. If you can point me in the right direction, I think they may be a solution to my problems!

 

[System Error Message]

You can using load balancing but it is not simple and you would also need to set the routes for both links too. Ive done this before using multiple PPPOE links over a single cable to get better data rates from my ISP. However PPPOE is a L2 protocol. You can configure interfaces to have the same IP addresses and gateways but you than must configure the routes so that it can work properly. You can do this with different IPs but it is more complicated. Packets went through the best available link and did use both links at the same time.

You can also load balance things as long as you can use the firewall for them if they use a specific port and or protocol. If RDP is L7 than you will have to add the hash to the firewall in order to use it. One thing you can do is to have 2 firewall rules in routerOS, the first one with a rate limit that sends everything through the first link and a 2nd general rule that sends everything else to the 2nd link.

One of the tools that routerOS provides is a PPP scanner which is very useful to detect PPP servers so you can choose multiple good ones at the same time.

RouterOS is the same across all models.

 

[Samir]

You can using load balancing but it is not simple and you would also need to set the routes for both links too. Ive done this before using multiple PPPOE links over a single cable to get better data rates from my ISP. However PPPOE is a L2 protocol. You can configure interfaces to have the same IP addresses and gateways but you than must configure the routes so that it can work properly. You can do this with different IPs but it is more complicated. Packets went through the best available link and did use both links at the same time.

You can also load balance things as long as you can use the firewall for them if they use a specific port and or protocol. If RDP is L7 than you will have to add the hash to the firewall in order to use it. One thing you can do is to have 2 firewall rules in routerOS, the first one with a rate limit that sends everything through the first link and a 2nd general rule that sends everything else to the 2nd link.

One of the tools that routerOS provides is a PPP scanner which is very useful to detect PPP servers so you can choose multiple good ones at the same time.

RouterOS is the same across all models.

That's what I thought. In my research, I found that it could do multi-wan very well, but not the peplink style vpn bonding, which is what I need.

 

[AaronHolio]

HI, Martin from Peplink here. Since the Balance 50 only supports link load balancing across the available WAN links, the OpenVPN session can only use one WAN link at a time, so you can never have more than one WAN links bandwidth available for it. You get awesome failover functionality though.

We have our own VPN bonding technology called SpeedFusion which works between two of our SpeedFusion Enabled devices that can aggregate bandwidth from all available WANs. You can read about that here http://www.peplink.com/technology/speedfusion-bonding-technology/

So just so I can have this on record from Peplink -- This $500 router I just bought to combine my two 6mbit DSL lines and a new 75mbit cableone connection that I am creating wirelessly 3mi away into town -- I can't actually stack any of the connections so that speedtest.net shows a cumlitive number - or any download tool that opened multiple connections -- like a round robin outgoing connection where any time I load a web page it tries to split up the downloading of the page components over the 3 connections based not just on their usage, but with a desire to stack the 3 connections into a faster single connection without using another PepLink somewhere on the net creating a single VPN'd IP??

I was trying to replicate what is done with this super low cost TP-Link load bal router, but all I've been able to do is slow down my overall speeds. However, I have created a more reliable and flexible setup than the TP-Link.
This guy doubles his speedtest.net score in a few minutes of configuration. I can't seem to do the same with my Peplink 50.

And just what features can I unlock on my already spendy model 50 device buying activation keys?